Review: aaxa LED PICO Pocket Projector
The LED PICO Pocket Projector is frankly beautiful; it’s so small that you want to carry it around just because you can. It’s about the size of an old iPhone, and weighs hardly anything. You know the way you can’t help but smile at lovely, cute small things? Well that’s how the LED PICO makes you smile.
The basic stats are pretty impressive: 80 minutes running on a battery, 25 lumens bright, decent resolution and multiple input formats. And largely it lives up to expectations. The main game is always going to be the actual projection and we found that to be surprisingly good. It’s not as good as a full-sized projector, but it was never going to be: It is more than good enough when put in the context of the extremely portable form-factor.
Set-up is simple and the package comes with a micro-USB and a AV cable, as well as a tripod that fits neatly but wont take too much cable-weight. It does not, however, come with an HDMI cable. It’s also worth noting that the LED PICO Pocket Projector takes a mini-HDMI connector and we had to buy a converter dongle before we could use it with anything we had lying about the place.
As long as you want to connect up from VGA, from a USB stick, from an microSD-card, or if you have a device with HDMI-out you are off and running in moments. The real limitation is that so few devices do have an HDMI-out option. Our greatest disappointment was that we couldn’t get our Chromecast device running with the projector as that would have made it accessible to any of our computers.
If you want to run a slide show, show off a document or anything along those lines the LED PICO Pocket Projector is a fine bit of kit. Videos run well too, but the in-built speakers are not much to write home about. Fine for basic playback, but for anything more serious you’re going to want to add on external speakers.
Overall we were very impressed with the LED PICO Pocket Projector; and at a retail price of around $150 it becomes even more impressive. If you want a really portable projector, this is it.
We projected stuff on a unit lent to us by the lovely folk at Expansys.